Pre-Owned Wedding Dresses: The New Path to a Sustainable Wedding
In recent years, the wedding world has seen a significant increase in the number of couples focused on sustainability, smaller budgets, and do it yourself projects. At first, these things could mainly be seen in the decorations of a wedding, the amount spent on vendors, and the increase in couples choosing elopements and small destination weddings, but now it seems it could possibly be seen in a new area of the wedding world: wedding dresses.
According to a study by fashion search platform Lyst, there has been a significant increase in the number of people interested in pre-owned, second hand, and vintage dresses.
“there has been a 93% increase in views of pre-owned wedding dresses, with a 42% combined increase for wedding dress searches including the words “vintage” and “second hand” year on year”There has also been a rise in peer-to-peer selling and dress rental platforms, showing that people are starting to favor a more monetized wedding wardrobe.
So what is helping this trend become so popular? Lyst further researched into what could be the cause and found that social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram, have been huge contributors to this be creating “peak personal brand moments” by helping display photographers’ work and supporting trends through customizable hashtags.
While social media has helped, the platform that has really helped with the increase in sales of pre-owned dresses is what could be considered the “Airbnb of wedding dresses,” Stillwhite. This company is the world’s largest wedding dress resale platform, operating in 116 countries and generating in excess of $26 million for sellers to date. Not only does this site help generate money for the dress owners, but it is also helping the planet by encouraging shoppers to be more sustainable by purchasing second-hand dresses. Stillwhite has even been able to calculate just how sustainable they have been and has calculated the carbon emissions, liters of water, and amount of money they have been able to save brides from around the world. Currently, Stillwhite has over 300,000 registered users spread over 171 countries and 43,000 dresses for sale. The funny thing? Stillwhite owns no dresses, and are proving just how strong peer-to-peer selling businesses can be.
